"Our Old Neighborhood."

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heard my dear mother in monthly meeting with much emotion bear testimony to her love to Christ, and my brother James with impressive earnestness, speak of his firm conviction that there is no "other name either in Heaven or among men" whereby we must be saved. Many others have I here heard speak of their earnest, abiding, uplifting trust in the world's Redeemer. All of my father's family and nearly all of your grandfather Willard's, belonged to that old church, and it is the sacred shrine of our two households and of many others.

My mother does not here record what she has often told me, that in 1829 my father, then a handsome, popular young man, who, while he was noted for good morals, had never manifested any interest in Christianity, had gone to the neighborhood prayermeeting in the "stone school-house," now demolished, and rising in his place had asked for prayers. But so set back were the people that for a moment nobody moved, whereupon he fell on his knees in the midst of the group and poured out his soul with strong crying and tears. This was in the midst of "harvest time," that busiest season of the Western New York farmer, but so great was the resulting interest that a “reformation" broke out, involving more than thirty heads of families. Almost without exception, the older households of Willard and Hill, my father's and mother's kindred, were already members, and from that time on, the younger were strong adherents of the faith. It was a nonsectarian denomination, gathered from Presbyterian, Baptist, Methodist and Unitarian, and called by the broadest possible name, "The Church of God in Ogden." The neighborhood was of the best; profane word would have marked a man as "below the pauper line," in brain and social status. A drunkard was unknown. My father's only brother, Zophar Willard, now sev enty-nine years old, for sixty years a leader in the community, assures me that he never saw a drunken man until he was seventeen, and that one was an importation. My uncle says of Grandfather Hill: "He was a wonderful exhorter and when imbued with the Holy Spirit, the tears would run down his cheeks and a holy unction inspired his very tones. He was never satisfied except when thus broken down by the Spirit. Once he felt that he was not as helpful in the meetings as he wished to be and he went home. That night the power of God rested so mightily upon him that his whole household, wife and eight children, joined with him in a most memorable prayer-meeting. He was a marvelous

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"The Old Stone Church."

man in prayer. His wife was one of the Lord's saints. She was goodness itself and a mighty power in talking." She was so spiritually-minded that she would talk out loud to herself about God's beautiful world, for she seemed to hear Him breathing in all His works. Her son James was herself over again, and his daughter Morilla was so spiritual that she seemed not to belong to this world and when she died she was perfectly aware of the presence of angels in her room. My gentle Grandfather, Oliver A. Willard, was the first, Uncle James Hill, second, and Cousin Henry Dusinbury, third and last clerk, of the Old Stone Church. Uncle Zophar Willard, Uncle Ward Hall, Cousins John and Sheldon Hill were all officially connected with it.

The 16th of April, 1888, was calm and sunshiny. Uncle Willard's beautiful home on the hill in the suburbs of Churchville gave us, as so often, its quiet shelter, and though we missed the loving smile, the wit and brightness of dear Aunt Caroline, his widowed sister, and so long his home-maker, we were thoroughly content in the care of the noble, genial uncle, who had done us good and not evil all the days of our lives. In the morning we went with him to the Congregational church in the village, of which he has so long been the leading spirit, and listened to the gifted young minister in whom his heart rejoiced. After dinner we drove up North," where we had delightful calls in the pleasant, well-to-do homes of Aunt Sarah Hill Hall and Cousin Sarah Gilman Dusinbury. At three o'clock we all gathered at the church, a quaint old structure standing at the foot of a long, graceful slope on the top of which is the picturesque Willard homestead of auld lang syne. The present residents of the home, Mr. and Mrs. Way, with Cousin Sarah, had brightened and beautified the old sanctuary with an improvised setting for the platform, of carpet, easy chairs and potted plants. All the relatives and neighbors who yet remain, with many new ones, besides youth and maiden, boy and girl, not of our circle, packed the little church, and, Uncle Willard presiding, we sang the old hymns so often echoed by those walls from voices long since silent. "How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord," "Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah," and "There is a land of pure delight," seemed to me tenderly to invoke the spirit of the sacred past. Then in rich tones full of pathos, my Cousin Sarah read

The Gospel of Health.

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the ninetieth Psalm, "Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations," and the Churchville minister, Rev. Mr. McConnell, led in prayer with a brother's sympathy for all that the hour signified to us. After that I frankly told the kind people all my heart, taking, "The Master is come and calleth for thee," as a text, and setting what I tried to say to the key of

“We are traveling home to God,

In the way our fathers trod."

I told them what Christianity meant to my heart, and what I believed it meant to custom and law, to society and government. It stirred my spirit deeply as I realized in some small measure what it signified to testify as one of the cloud of witnesses who belonged to the same household of faith with those who within these walls had found and taught the unsearchable riches of Christ. Born of a Christian race, bred in a Christian home, I dedicated myself anew in the Old Stone Church that day to Christ and to His Gospel, vowing that by His grace I would be in this and every world where I might live, a woman whom the Lord could trust.

THE GOSPEL OF HEALTH.

It was my remarkably good fortune to be born of parents who were clean from the alcohol and tobacco taint, and, so far as I can trace my ancestry through several generations, there was but one intemperate person in the ranks, and he was a distant relative out of the direct line. It was also my unspeakable privilege, being "only a girl," to enjoy the utmost freedom from fashionable restraints up to my seventeenth year. Clad during three fourths of the year in flannel suits, not unlike those worn at "gymnastics" now by young lady collegians, and spending most of my time in the open air, the companion in work as well as in sport of my only brother, I knew much more about handling rake and hoe than I did of frying-pan and needle; knew the name and use of every implement used by carpenter and joiner; could chase the sheep all day and never tire; had a good knowledge of farming, gardening, and the like; was an enthusiastic poultry raiser, and by means of this natural, outdoor life, eight or nine hours' sleep in twenty-four, a sensible manner of dress, and the plain fare of bread and butter, vegetables, eggs,

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The Gospel of Longevity.

milk, fruit and fowl, was enabled to "store up electricity" for the time to come.

My parents lived five years at Oberlin before I was seven years of age, at the time when Grahamites" were popular, and they became indoctrinated with many of the ideas of Dr. Jennings, whose "Water Cure" book my father was fond of reading. As a result, the three children were each promised a library, to cost $100, if we would not touch tea or coffee until we became of age. Subsequently I used both for years, very moderately, but have now almost discarded them. A physician was an unknown visitant to our home in early days. I have no recollection of such a personage being called for me before I was fourteen, and although my mother says that, when an infant, I was the feeblest of her children, I have outlived all the family except herself. My father died in his sixty-third year, and my mother is now in her eighty-fifth, her grandmother having lived to be nearly ninety-seven, and the ancestors on both sides being remarkable for their longevity.

I never saw the inside of a school-house until near my teens, but was encouraged to read and study somewhat at home, and always lived in an intellectual atmosphere, my parents and our few friends and neighbors being persons of education and earnestness of purpose. Although my first school was in a country district, the teacher was a graduate of Vale, and had been for years a classical tutor in Oberlin College. My parents were of Puritanical training as to Sabbath observance, and I count its rhythmic period of rest, as well as the late beginning of my school days, an element in the health antecedents here enumerated. I have written thus in detail of what might be popularly termed the "indirect reasons" for my life-long good health, because my study of the temperance question teaches me that heredity and early training are the most direct "procuring causes" of physical soundness.

I am now in my fiftieth year, and though, since sharing the great and varied disabilities of a more conventional life, I have had two acute illnesses and several slight ones, my health is so uniform that I have often laughingly told my friends I had composed the first line of my "great epic," and it is this:

"Painless, in a world of pain."

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The chief wonder of my life is that I dare to have so good a time, both physically, mentally and religiously. I have swung like a pendulum through my years, "without haste, without rest.” What it would be to have an idle hour I find it hard to fancy. With no headache, why should I not think "right straight ahead"? My whole life has been spent in intellectual activities, having begun to teach when about twenty years of age, and having pursued that difficult avocation with no set-back or breakdown until I dedicated myself to the Temperance Reform in 1874. (I should except about two years and a half of hard study, writing and travel in Europe and the East between 1868 and 1870.) In the last twelve years I have been perpetually "on the road," going 15,000 to 20,000 miles per year, visiting in 1883 every state and territory in the Union and holding a meeting once per day on an average throughout the entire period. It has been my custom to write articles and letters and plan work, all day long on the cars, being thus constantly employed, and then to give an address at night.

Now, I am aware that this is not a hygienic mode of procedure, and that to breathe car-air and audience-atmosphere, year in and year out, is not conducive to the best development. But it was the only way for me to reach the one thousand towns set as my "stint" (a farm fashion we had, this of "doing our stint," persisted in as an inherited tendency), and feeling so adequate to the day's doings, I went steadily on, taking the opportunity to recline in the quiet of my apartment, between the meetings, stating to my friends that visiting was impossible to me, and making. it an invariable rule to go directly from the platform to my room. Here a cup of bread and milk, a cracker, or a few spoonfuls of beef-tea were taken in order to set up a counteraction to the movements of the brain, and I went to sleep a few minutes after going to my room, usually getting eight hours, in every twentyfour, of "tired nature's sweet restorer." A bright Chicago woman said to me when I told her this, "You acted according to the proverb, 'He who fights and runs away, may live to fight another day,' for I interpret that to mean, 'He who runs away promptly at nightfall from the day's warfare will live to plunge into the fight next morning, and so on from year to year, and will be a victor always.''